The present invention relates to automatic systems for handling the dereeling of interleaved tapes.
It is many times desirable to store and dispense tapes wound as multiple or interleaved layers on a common reel. For example, in a pultrusion process in which tapes of resin impregnated fibers are compressed under substantial heat and pressure to form laminated structures, it is desirable to supply the individual tape lamina or plies from multiple supply reels carrying the component resin tapes. Thus, in a pultrusion system and in general, in any process for laminating resin impregnated fibrous plies, the individual plies exhibit considerable tackiness, such that when supplied in elongate form and wound by itself on a reel, the windings tend to adhere to one another and are difficult to separate during dereeling. Examples of other laminating processes are found in U.S. Pat. No. 2,822,575 issued to R. Imbert et al. on Feb. 11, 1958, and U.S. Pat. No. 2,977,630 issued to Bagler on Apr. 4, 1961.
Because of this, resin tape plies are wound on storage reels with an interleaved release tape, typically a paper tape treated with a parting agent or other releasing agent. The interleaved release tape separates relatively easily from the sticky resin tapes and prevents the windings of the resin tape from adhering to one another. However, during the dereeling operation, the release tapes must be stripped from the resin tape and guided away from the dereeling station to a disposal facility. Even with the treatment of the release tape with the parting agent, there is still some residual stickiness and adherence of the release tape to the resin tape requiring the application of a stripping force to the release tape in order to effect its removal from the storage reel. Moreover, in a pultrusion laminating system, a multiplicity of the resin supply reels with the interleaved release tapes are simultaneously dereeled for supplying the plural lamina or plies to the pultrusion die station. This in turn requires the stripping away and disposal of a plurality of release tapes simultaneously with the dereeling of the plural resin tapes.
Furthermore, the source or supply reels of the resin and interleaved release tapes may be at varying stages or depletion, and the associated release tapes may be of varying sizes, e.g., width. Thus, for a given pultrusion operation, the release tape handling facility must accommodate tapes simultaneously from relatively large and small supply reels, and tapes of different widths, and maintain the proper synchronization to the pull rate of the dereeled resin tapes.